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Project Orion: The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship (Allen Lane Science)
 
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Project Orion: The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship (Allen Lane Science) (Hardcover)
by George Dyson (Author)
3.7 out of 5 stars  (3 customer reviews)

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Amazon.co.uk Review
Like cheap, shiny space suits and bug-eyed rubber monsters, nuclear-powered spaceships such as described in Project Orion today seem like little more than laughably naive 1950s science fiction tropes. It might have been otherwise--and still could be. George Dyson, son of supergenius physicist Freeman Dyson, wrote Project Orion to share some of his father's amazing research with the world. Much had been kept secret for years, but Dyson's unique insider status permits great depth and breadth on this important tale.

Conceived in the wake of Sputnik, Project Orion was a true vision of 50s engineering: a huge 40-person ship powered by hundreds of tiny atomic bombs, capable of much greater lift and efficiency than chemically driven rockets. Struggles between NASA, the military, Congress, and other parties doomed Orion, but Dyson has gathered hundreds of documents and interviewed most of the researchers and engineers who worked together, trying to reach "Saturn by 1970". His knack for storytelling makes the book a quick, delightful read; even the staunchest anti-nuke activist has to admit that lighting a cigarette off a parabolic mirror facing a bomb test is pretty cool. By the end of the 20th century, technology had caught up with the vision of Orion--it's considered one of our best bets for long-distance space transit. Whether or not that could ever happen politically, Project Orion is a compelling exploration of scientific imagination. --Rob Lightner

Synopsis
The race to the moon dominated space flight during the decade of the 1960s. Yet, during the late 1950s and early 1960s, the US government sponsored a project that could possibly have sent 150 people on expeditions to Mars or Saturn. The codename of the project was "Orion", and it centered upon the effort to develop a 40,000-ton, fast, manoeuvrable, nuclear-powered space vehicle for long-range voyages in space. Strictly classified, Project Orion ultimately failed. In this book, George Dyson, son of physicist Freeman Dyson, one of the original project team, tells his father's story.

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Customer Reviews

3 Reviews
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating, but flawed, 23 Jul 2002
Project Orion sounds like something from science fiction - after all, how could a spaceship be propelled by nuclear explosions? The Orion concept was proposed by reputable scientists and every single one of their experiments showed that it was a perfectly feasible method of exploring the solar system.

Orion is one of the great 'might-have-beens' of the Cold War, had it gone ahead, Man could have landed on Mars in the early 1970s and we would have lived in a World more like that of '2001' than that of 'Full Metal Jacket'. In the end, the project died a death; unloved by the government it was finally condemned by the nuclear test ban treaty.

The book is concisely written, but it fails to convey the excitement of such a huge and ambitious project. There is very little sense of the awe it must have invoked, which can make it somewhat dry reading.

I also knock a point off for the lamentable illustrations. There are no glossy plates which means that none of the pictures are terribly sharp, and some pictures are very poor indeed. There are a number of declassified diagrams from the 1950s with little or no explanation, whilst others lack any context whatsoever. This type of book would really have benefited from high quality graphics.

I recommend this wholeheartedly if you are interested in space travel; you probably will never have a better history of the Orion project. Casual readers might find it a little hard going.

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Saturn V would have looked like a firework..., 19 Nov 2002
By A Customer
A compelling look at a smallish team working on an enormous idea...an idea we may need one day if the doom merchants are to be believed. Sadly the book suffers from a lack of editing, A couple of times I felt I was reading the same paragraph twice and the timelin